Early in ministry, I found myself drawn to the writings of Brennan Manning. Maybe it was because he refused to play the religious games so many of us had grown tired of. Maybe it was because he told the truth about himself, about us, about God.

Or maybe it was because his words felt like oxygen in a suffocating version of Christianity that seemed far more concerned with behavior modification than heart transformation.

I grew up around a version of faith that often felt like this: Don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t chew, don’t go with girls who do. And, just to be safe, don’t dance!

That was the shorthand for holiness. If you crossed those lines? Well, you probably weren’t a “good Christian.” And, let’s be honest, you probably weren’t a good dancer either!

But even early on, I couldn’t reconcile that version of religion with Jesus…because Jesus never said they would know we are Christians by our rulebooks. He never said they would know us by our politics, our bumper stickers, our doctrinal statements, or our ability to point out who’s wrong.

In John 13, on the night before the cross, Jesus gives what might be his clearest command: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

That’s it. Not if you win arguments. Not if you keep all the rules. Not if you maintain perfect theology.

He really made it this simple…if you love.

Of course, we keep making it more complicated.

Brennan Manning helped me see that the gospel was never about sorting humanity into the deserving and undeserving. It was about grace.

He wrote: “My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.”

That changes everything. When you truly know you are loved like that…undeservedly, relentlessly, without condition…you become less interested in gatekeeping and more interested in extending that same grace.

Manning’s vision of heaven in The Ragamuffin Gospel still wrecks me. The prostitute. The addict. The compromised businessman. The wounded teenager. The insecure pastor. The broken, battered, bruised, and barely-holding-on people of the world.

There they are and there we are. Because the truth is, we are all ragamuffins who are deeply loved and welcomed by Jesus.

We are all, as JohnWesley might put it, sinners in need of grace. Wesley never denied the seriousness of sin. But his theology was always rooted in prevenient grace (the radical belief that God’s grace is at work in everyone before they ever know it). In his notes on the New Testament, Wesley repeatedly emphasizes that the heart of the law is love…love of God and love of neighbor. Everything else hangs on that.

Which means love isn’t the liberal option. Nor is it the conservative option.

Love is the Jesus option.

In fact, I’d argue the most progressive thing we can do is love one another. And the most traditional, orthodox, conservative thing we can do is love one another.

Because that’s what Jesus said.

Love fulfills the law. Love is the fulfillment of holiness. Love is the truest measure of faithfulness.

If Brennan Manning taught me anything, it’s that “the temptation of the age is to look good.” Goodness knows we spend a lot of energy trying to look good…to look righteous…to look pure…to look certain…to look superior.

But grace invites honesty, authenticity and vulnerability.

Manning wrote: “When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes.”

Aren’t we all? We believe and doubt. We love and resent. We trust and fear. We worship and wander.

The church would be healthier if we spent less time pretending and more time confessing…less time judging and more time listening…less time excluding and more time embracing.

That doesn’t mean anything goes. Grace is not permission to harm. Love is not the absence of truth.

But truth without love isn’t truth in the way of Jesus. Jesus was full of both grace and truth. But grace always seemed to get there first.

That’s what Bob Goff gets right when he says, “Love everybody, always.”

Not because everybody is easy to love. Not because everybody agrees with us. Not because everybody is right. But because love is what disciples do.

Maybe that’s where we can find common ground across all our divides. Progressive and conservative. Methodist and Baptist. Democrat and Republican. Straight and gay. Rich and poor. Certain and doubting.

We can find commons ground not by agreeing on everything, but by beginning with the humble recognition that we are all recipients of mercy.

If grace is big enough for us, it has to be big enough for every single person. Yes, even those with whom we disagree!

The church does not need more narrow-minded judgment. The world has enough of that already.

What the church needs is a people so rooted in grace that they cannot help but love radically, lavishly, and without keeping score.

At the end of the day, when all our systems, labels, tribes, and arguments fade away, love remains.

According to Jesus, that’s how they’ll know. Not by our signs. Not by our slogans. Not by our politics. But by our love.

So maybe it’s time to double down on grace…down on love…and loosen our grip on judgment.

Because if this isn’t good news to us, maybe we’ve never really understood the gospel at all.

Here are some of my favorite Manning quotes from “The Ragamuffin Gospel”

“Because salvation is by grace through faith, I believe that among the countless number of people standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palms in their hands (see Revelation 7:9), I shall see the prostitute from the Kit-Kat Ranch in Carson City, Nevada, who tearfully told me that she could find no other employment to support her two-year-old son. I shall see the woman who had an abortion and is haunted by guilt and remorse but did the best she could faced with grueling alternatives; the businessman besieged with debt who sold his integrity in a series of desperate transactions; the insecure clergyman addicted to being liked, who never challenged his people from the pulpit and longed for unconditional love; the sexually abused teen molested by his father and now selling his body on the street, who, as he falls asleep each night after his last ‘trick’, whispers the name of the unknown God he learned about in Sunday school.

‘But how?’ we ask.

Then the voice says, ‘They have washed their robes and have made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’

There they are. There *we* are – the multitude who so wanted to be faithful, who at times got defeated, soiled by life, and bested by trials, wearing the bloodied garments of life’s tribulations, but through it all clung to faith. 

My friends, if this is not good news to you, you have never understood the gospel of grace.”

“For those who feel their lives are a grave disappointment to God, it requires enormous trust and reckless, raging confidence to accept that the love of Jesus Christ knows no shadow of alteration or change. When Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy burdened,” He assumed we would grow weary, discouraged, and disheartened along the way. These words are a touching testimony to the genuine humanness of Jesus. He had no romantic notion of the cost of discipleship. He knew that following Him was as unsentimental as duty, as demanding as love.”

“How I treat a brother or sister from day to day, how I react to the sin-scarred wino on the street, how I respond to interruptions from people I dislike, how I deal with normal people in their normal confusion on a normal day may be a better indication of my reverence for life than the antiabortion sticker on the bumper of my car.”